Special Report: Management Excellence

May 2011

A report released this month by Oracle revealed that large organizations struggle with a lack of visibility into profits that is impairing financial performance, morale and business success. The research, entitled “Performance Management: An Incomplete Picture,” also highlights the significant issues with the data-gathering processes that is central in creating a dangerous four-month data lag. “Management is clearly struggling to cope with the vast volumes of data being generated by their businesses, which is manifesting itself in a serious lack of visibility into profitability across the entire company,” says John O’Rourke, vice president of EPM Product Marketing at Oracle. “Without enterprise business planning systems to give organizations an end-to-end planning process that links strategic, financial, and operational planning to profitability and cost management, they are going to continue to struggle with fragmentation and have no option but to continue 'making decisions in the dark'.” Here, learn more about what the report discovered, plus find out more about Oracle's performance management solutions.

Performance Management: An Incomplete Picture Oracle recently commissioned a global study investigating the level of management coherence and profit visibility in large companies. The research, undertaken by Dynamic Markets, surveyed 1,500 organizations and generated some eye-opening statistics. Download the full research report and gain insight into how some of the world's largest companies are effectively making decisions 'in the dark'. Registration required. Cost and Profit Management in the Wake of the Recent Downturn Instead of the aggressive cost-cutting required when top-line revenues were flat or shrinking, organizations are now taking a much more 'surgical' approach to cost and profit management. Such an approach requires accurate allocation of both costs and revenues by individual product lines, services, customer segments, locations, channels, and other lines of business.

EPM Sets Sail General Dynamics launches global financial planning initiatives with Oracle: “Building a ship is a lengthy and complex process,” says Bath Iron Works' Andrew Bond. “We adopted the Oracle Hyperion software to automate our weekly operational reporting and to add new capabilities for better forecasting. The Oracle Hyperion EPM solution enables us to take an extraordinary amount of complex data and aggregate it in a logical fashion to produce quick and simple answers much faster than we've ever been able to before.”

Getting to Green: Three key steps for preparing enterprise data for sustainability reportingWhile there are a number of specialized applications emerging to support energy, carbon, and sustainability reporting, many enterprises are starting to leverage their existing enterprise performance management (EPM) and business intelligence (BI) solutions to collect and report sustainability metrics. These existing applications support a repeatable high-quality sustainability reporting process built considering three key activities: data collection and contextualization, data aggregation, and data reporting and analysis.

Enterprise Dimension Management Gains Momentum “One of the fastest-growing products in the Oracle Hyper ion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) product line is Hyperion Data Relationship Management (DRM). Why is this? Well, it appears that the concept of Enterprise Dimension Management is rapidly being embraced by customers as a core requirement and foundation technology to their EPM and BI strategies.” writes John O’Rourke, vice president of EPM Product Marketing at Oracle.